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Online Tracking & Attorney/Client Privilege

It's been confirmed that we are being tracked. The metadata from our cell phone conversations and our Internet searches is being watched by the NSA for terrorist activity. We are surely still trying to figure out the legal implications of this, and in the legal world, the attorney/client privilege comes to mind.

From the abstract of a 2011 Virgin Journal of Law & Technology article:
Attorney-client privilege, work-product protection, and the attorney’s ethical requirement to protect confidentiality of client information are at risk from commercial surveillance of online activity. Behavioral advertising, data aggregation and sale, and government access to commercially assembled profiles have been denounced as threats to privacy and confidentiality interests, but the harm to attorney and client confidentiality is of particular concern. As the legal research and broader information industries shift from print materials to services on the internet, attorneys cannot simply avoid the online environment to protect confidentiality. This article examines the risk from tracking of online legal research and draws two conclusions: 1) Lawyers must take reasonable precautions to protect confidentiality of internet-based research; and 2) Reasonable precautions are elusive due to the constant evolution of tracking technologies and practices, so attorneys should work collectively to update best practices and to evaluate and influence online industry activities so that the time-honored confidential nature of legal representation can be preserved.

This article appeared in 2011 and discusses data tracking for commercial purposes. But attorneys need to be ever more cautious with the confirmed data collection by the government, especially because metadata is currently the least protected form of communication information. Can the government draw conclusions about your legal research in terms of a client's guilt or innocence? It remains to be seen.

In my opinion, one thing is certain: attorneys need to advocate for the greater protection of metadata to effectively protect their clients and the attorney/client privilege. Instead of the law following technology, we need to be on the forefront and preempt any state intrusion into our metadata for improper purposes.

The current version of Standard 601(3)(a) was developed during the Comprehensive Review as a method of involving a law library in the process of strategic planning required of a law school. It was envisioned that the planning and assessment taking place for a law school (under what was then Standard 203) would incorporate the work done by the library under this new Standard. To ensure that incorporation, it was decided that a written assessment should be completed by the library. However, when the requirement for strategic planning for a law school was removed during a later phase of the Comprehensive Review, no change was made to the new Standard 601. As a result, the library community has been left…

Law libraries are in the information business. To act as superior guides to this information, we must also be in the people business. We must be concerned with the people who seek our information. And we must be concerned with the people who guide those seekers to the information (i.e., our staff).

Contrary to popular belief, it's not easy to be a staff person in the rigid hierarchy of an academic law library. Particularly at a time when law libraries are facing increased budget pressures that require staff to do much more with much less. This is especially challenging with longtime staff who have seen their jobs change dramatically since they were hired. Many of these folks were not formally trained in librarianship, and they may be resistant to the flexibility needed in today's law library.

Given these challenges, how do we motivate our staff to be the very best guides to our information?

To that end, there was an enlightening program at the AALL Annual Conference in 2013 t…

As we further consider how to train future lawyers for the Algorithmic Society and develop the quality of thinking, listening, relating, collaborating, and learning that will define smartness in this new age, law schools must reach beyond their storied walls.

In law, we must got beyond talking about algorithmic implications to actually help shape algorithmic performance. We need lawyers and programmers to work together to create a sound "machine learning corpus." There's potential for an entirely new subfield to emerge if given the right support. With many law school attached to major research universities, it's a great place to start this cross-pollination and interdisciplinary work.

This type of interdisciplinary work would help to satisfy the career aspirations of advanced-degree seekers but also the wishes of many college presidents, deans, and faculty members who see an interdisciplinary professional education as a path to greater relevance, higher enrollments,…